I decided to take part in the 48 hour drawing challenge that Cardiff Animation Festival held one week ago with three other animators. I only knew Christina, my tutor, beforehand and the other two team members were someone who is going to study at the Character Animation MA next year and the other someone who already graduated.

The reason to why I decided to take part in this competition is first and foremost that I and super competitive and love pushing myself but also because Christina was the one asking people if they wanted to join and I thought I could learn a lot from being on her team.

Brainstorming the story before going off to storyboards we came to the conclusion that the story was an essential key in this story and that we would keep that in mind throughout the film, possibly compromising other elements in order to be able to tell the story. We then all proceeded onto making storyboards with the intend of merging elements of the story later on.

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Together with one other group member, I did character design for the story. My characters eded up too uniform as seen in the third image below but on the other hand I had a strong design of the main character. The other group member on the other hand had versatile side characters, so we merged our characters together, which was also a really good experience using elements of both of our work.

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Before starting the competition we wrote down our expectations of we all wanted out of the experience, how much we each planned on working and which areas we excelled in and which areas we didn’t have much experience in. I put down that I wasn’t strong in clean-up and coloring, which were actually two things I ended up doing a lot of as it was a very time consuming activity so I learned incredibly much from the others who showed me the most effective way of doing so.

Christina showed me rather than manually coloring in every frame with a pencil, it would actually be more effective and precise to use the Filled Stroke as seen below. This made so much sense when I started using it but wasn’t something I would initially have thought of myself.

As a team we decided on not cleaning up our rough animation lines but instead coloring the characters with shapes and only drawing inside the shapes to create some definition in the character.

Towards the end we saw that we fell short of time and as a means of problem solving, we decided on now doing the inside lines of some of the shots as we simply wouldn’t be able to finish if we did so. Instead we overlaid the rough animation lines onto the colored shapes as seen below with the two different approaches:

We decided on doing this as we determined beforehand that the story was the most important factor of this animation and as long as we were still able to tell the story, this was the right solution as a means of time saving.

The festival will be held in two days time so I won’t yet be able to upload the film. We did finish roughly in time but decided to spend a couple of additional days cleaning up the inside of the shapes and adding some keyframes where we had to compromise them as well due to the lack of time. We were all very happy about how the film turned out and certainly keeping in mind that we only had 48 hours, we were able to produce a 2 minute film in such a short amount of time.

This subject is something I have throughout the years been so ignorant about as I haven’t been taught about it from school, parents or peers. It is a subject that’s not talked about because there is so much victim blaming and shame behind using the the words “assaults” and “harassmentt” because what if you just overreacted? What if they won’t take you seriously. In the light of Sarah Everard’s disappearance in Clapham, South London, who was just walking home from a friend’s house and was most likely sexually assaulted and murdered. It has encouraged so many women on social media to speak up about the subject of sexual assault and the precautions women has to make when walking alone compared to what a man needs to watch out for. Here are some examples:

It made me think about an incredible graphic novel I bought over summer, where I also wrote a story about my personal experience with sexual harassment. It’s called Drawing Power and tells stories of women’s sexual harassment and violence. It is amazing and contains loads of stories on subjects that are not talked about a lot and it really put everything into perspective for me. Here are some of the stories with their respective illustrations, that really impacted me:

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I have many friends who have opened up to me about being touched without consent, even some who experienced sexual intercourse without consent. When I told them “What you experienced is rape”, they brush it off saying “No it probably wasn’t what they meant”, “No it wasn’t that serious, I don’t want to overreact” or even “I don’t know if I actually told him to stop so it’s my own fault”. WHY!!! WHY are women blaming themselves for being sexually molested, touched inappropriately or given unwanted sexual attention? 

It made me so sad and angry at the same time that my female friends wouldn’t admit to being raped regardless of telling me that they didn’t consent to sexual intercourse and was physically held down when the male inserted their penis into them. Apologies for being so blunt but I feel it’s necessary to get the point across. Every time I open up about my experiences with unwanted sexual attention or groping, the female I open up to always have a story of their own to share. This saddens me deeply and I want to share my story to encourage others to share theirs as well.

I want to share my own personal experience, which I’m planning on making into a short graphic novel later on. It’s a piece of text I wrote last summer right after having read Drawing Power.

When I was younger

I had trouble defining what was right and what was wrong when it came to guys

I wanted attention from them, I wanted them to like me and think I was beautiful

A night out wouldn’t be complete without being groped a few times

I didn’t second guess it, I was so used to it

Until one day when my friend slapped a guy out of the blue and yelled:

“FUCK YOU!!! He grabbed my ass!!!” The guy ran off, yelling “Bitch!”

Thinking that she overreacted slightly, I sheepishly replied “that happens to me all the time, don’t worry about it”

“Marie, that’s sexual assault” I didn’t know at the time…

Is was a group of guys who thought it was funny how she stood up for herself angrily shouting at them. They came back for more, laughing at her, trying to grope her ass and breasts. She cried and we ended up leaving the club.

Today I’ll happily be the one slapping someone’s face if they grope me. This has to be vocalised way more as it’s still happening so often.

Touching someone without their consent should never be normalised.